Author Archives: Michiel Luchtman

Michiel Luchtman

About Michiel Luchtman

Michiel Luchtman is professor at the Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology and the Utrecht Centre for Regulation and Enforcement in Europe (RENFORCE). He is also the director of Graduate Studies and member of the board of Utrecht Law School. His research and teaching focus on the consequences of Europeanisation for criminal justice and law enforcement in general; on criminal law and fundamental rights; on economic criminal law, as well as criminal tax law. Luchtman also (co-)supervises several PhD projects on these issues. Luchtman is the Dutch contact point of ECLAN, the EU criminal law academic network, and a member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on Criminal Policy.

The CJEU judgments in C-117/20 bpost and C-151/20 Nordzucker: Fundamental rights as a vehicle for hybrid enforcement mechanisms?

In its recent judgments in bpost and Nordzucker, the CJEU held – in essence – that to prevent a violation of the ne bis in idem guarantee in Article 50 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, public authorities need to cooperate and coordinate their punitive enforcement actions, also when they are active in different policy areas or in other jurisdictions. According to Michiel Luchtman, the paradoxical result seems to be that to prevent one fundamental right from being violated, it is necessary to accept (sometimes intrusive) interferences with other rights. Has the Court now entered a slippery slope, eliminating fundamental rights barriers, to promote the effective enforcement of EU law? And if so, at the expense of what?

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